PHP: Best way to extract text within parenthesis?

Question

What\'s the best/most efficient way to extract text set between parenthesis? Say I wanted to get the string \"text\" from the string \"ignore everything except this (text)\"

Answer 1

function getStringsBetween($str, $start='[', $end=']', $with_from_to=true){
$arr = [];
$last_pos = 0;
$last_pos = strpos($str, $start, $last_pos);
while ($last_pos !== false) {
    $t = strpos($str, $end, $last_pos);
    $arr[] = ($with_from_to ? $start : '').substr($str, $last_pos + 1, $t - $last_pos - 1).($with_from_to ? $end : '');
    $last_pos = strpos($str, $start, $last_pos+1);
}
return $arr; }

this is a little improvement to the previous answer that will return all patterns in array form:

getStringsBetween('[T]his[] is [test] string [pattern]') will return: